The Road Home
by Dunkthejunk
Summary: We delve into the thoughts of the Outbreak characters in different scenarios of the game.WARNING! There may be some slash in a few of these, if you can't handle it, it's not the story for you!


Hi everyone. Be gentle with me. It's my first attempt at a fan fiction.

This is going to be more of an insight into emotion in the beginning. I'm not that great with action, so I've gotta go with what I know. Which, yep, is feeling.

I always wondered what the Outbreak characters were feeling during certain scenes. I read a story on fanfiction about what David King was feeling before he died that inspired me.

So that's what I'm going to try to show. A little bit of thought and feeling with each scenario.

Hope you enjoy! If you do, R&R, if not, R&R. I can take it, I promise! -D

ONE

Confusion.

Shock.

Depression.

My little brother died when I was nine years old.

I didn't understand how life could go on for everyone else.

Precipice. For the layman, a precipice is a moment where you stand on the edge of a great event. This could be a decision, this could be an action, or this could be the greatest thing you've ever done. Either way, it's something that will inevitably change a great portion of your life.

So you linger, you stare; you stand on your precipice, you gaze into the maw, and you decide: Leap? Or Stand?

I was standing on mine.

My little brother died when I was nine years old. I didn't understand how life could go on for everyone else. I didn't get how the grief didn't touch, didn't take, didn't swallow everyone else the way it swallowed me.

I thought, when the leukemia took him away, that if I could just survive this, survive this moment, I could live through anything. Waking up the next day in a room that still felt like him…surely that was the hardest thing in the world to overcome.

It wasn't. Not by far. Not even close.

I wasn't in the room when Charlie passed. Too young, my father said, to witness such terrible things.

But I was in the room when Yoko Suzuki died.

She was young. And quiet. And, often in the few hours I'd known her, the first person in the group of us survivors to try to mend a rift. She had one of those faces that just promised trust and friendship.

Maybe I'd tried so hard to protect her because she looked like I must have at nine years old. She said she was a college student, which meant she was at least a teenager, but she wasn't much taller then an adolescent. And that face again, that face that would go on to haunt my nightmares if I survived this mess.

My hands had been slick with blood. The wound on my shoulder wasn't closing.

Nothing stemmed the spill of scarlet down the navy cloth.

I'd stumbled, shouting, shouting, shouting but none of them was fast enough, none of us was good enough.

I was supposed to be. I was. I was the cop. It was my duty to protect and serve. Even if the city had fallen, it didn't alleviate the duty.

Though why I chose this moment to find my honor was beyond me. I'd spent the better part of the last year of my life trying my best to sabotage my own reputation.

For those who didn't know me, they saw what I wanted them to see: The alcoholic clinging desperately to his dignity by filling his days with the bottle and his nights with the job.

I was a cop but I'd never been one who'd been happy playing by the rules.

This was why I was always the first one through the door when the shit hit the fan. Why I was always the last one to leave when the carnage ended and the bullets stopped flying and the dead littered the floor beneath us.

And why I was the one who fought, screaming and shoving and kicking long after the .45 in my hand clicked empty, to get to that girl trapped beneath the bodies of a dozen moaning harbingers of death.

I could still hear the echo of her screams in my ears. I could still feel the panic and the terror that had turned my skin clammy and stolen my breath in useless shouts of desperation.

But we had been to few. And they too many.

The zombies had rolled down Main Street, burst that barricade, and none of us had had the time or the chance to do more then scramble around and die.

Die.

Die.

Die.

Like cockroaches. Like bugs, smashed beneath the boot of a cruel child. The others, I could still see them running, throwing themselves up those stairs so fast and furious, they often collided against each other in haste.

And yet I remained, pushing, punching. I felt the sink of teeth in my shoulder and rolled around to plant an elbow in a face that resembled melting candle wax.

The blood had been thick, spilling down my skin as she screamed, screamed, screamed.

As big as I was, as fast as I was, as strong, I couldn't fight off two dozen of them as they converged upon me, as they converged upon her. As somewhere behind us, that deep bass voice of the plumber was booming over the screams as he shouted our names.

I'd grabbed for her hand, grabbed for it as teeth sunk into my forearm, as hands ripped at my Kevlar vest, as another pair gnawed my ankle.

I grabbed for that hand as blood burst from her throat like a flower that had finally found a way to open to the sun. It sprayed over flesh that stunk of decay and week old hamburger and those dark eyes that had desperately turned to mine glazed with death. They went blank, empty, the eyes of a doll that was waiting to be picked up and played with and given some semblance of life through imagination and make believe.

I watched Yoko Suzuki die…from less then two feet away.

And this time, there was no around to tell me to wait in the other room. This time there was no around to pat my hand and tell me it would all be alright.

I watched hordes of the undead fall atop her body to feast and there was no one there to let me bury my face in their shoulder and hide.

What there was was a dozen or so still coming for me; hands and teeth and terror that bled from eyes that had long ago filmed over like those of a dead fish.

What there was was my death written on those thoughtless, emotionless faces.

And finally, the reverberating boom of the bomb that went off, shivering and shaking down the street like gongs banged in hell.

And a moment where I wondered, where I despaired, before the darkness ate the world and there was nothing left but confusion, depression, shock and the empty orbs of Yoko's eyes.


End file.
